By Kollengode S Venkataraman. September 2026
Mythological stories are, tautologically speaking, built around myths. What exactly is “myth,” as the West understands the word? Well, the meaning you get depends on the social, cultural, religious, and educational background, as well as the sophistication and biases of the Western scholars you approach. Here, “Western” does not refer to the geographic location of the scholar. If scholars — say Indians — are educated by Western methodologies and sources (books and journals) with no moorings in any Indian classic languages, epics, and traditions, they are “Western” scholars. Secondly, what you get will also depend on whose mythology — Greek or Indian, or others — you are asking about.
The West understands Greek mythology using a sophisticated yardstick with nuances, simply because stories of Greek gods and characters have already been woven into European languages. One example — there are many — is the story of Sisyphus, a cunning character in Greek mythology who imprisoned Death and created chaos because nobody died. Eventually, Sisyphus was punished for his hubris by making him engage in an endless task: rolling a massive boulder up a steep hill. Each time Sisyphus neared the top, the boulder would roll back, forcing him to start over again. This story, the West interprets with nuances describing tasks that never seem to end and never seem to give any results. Hence the English adjective Sisyphean.
However, the colonial and missionary-era West, with its own idea of sense of superiority, biases, and arrogance, was disdainful in understanding and explaining Hindu-Buddhist-Jain mythologies with any nuance.
So, we can even psychoanalyze the collective Western mind, studying how it understood, interpreted, and explained stories in Greek and Indian mythologies. Information available in the open literature will tell you a lot about these built-in biases in the Western psyche.
In many stories in Indian mythology, a powerful or ambitious man is portrayed as an asura or demon, given to intense pride, ambition, greed, and vanity (usually, a combination of these). He wants some extra power he does not have. So, he goes into intense tapas (disciplined austerities over a long time), seeking the specific power from Gods (who are different manifestations of Nature). After such intense, dedicated work, Gods cannot deny him the boon, because, after all, he has been working so hard for so long with total discipline, and with Herculean efforts (another English adjective rooted in Greek mythology!). In these mythological stories, hubris takes over the minds of the asuras who obtain these invincible powers from Gods, and they will self-destruct themselves.
This is equivalent to today’s modern nation-states (or corporations) spending an enormous amount of taxpayer (or investor) money running into hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars on R&D, committing hundreds of men and women to working for years and years. And they seek boons from Mother Nature (Prakrti), the Ultimate God in the Indian system of beliefs. The boons they seek can be lethal weapons and delivery systems, landing on the moon, conquering space, a new designer drug, or weapon-grade pathogen… …
Mankind with its tentacles wrapping the whole globe thus obtains great powers. Nation-states (and corporations) use these powers extracted from Nature to subdue enemies, competitors, or other real and perceived threats so that they can be at the top of the world, hopefully forever.
After some time, hubris takes over (“The Empire Where Sun Never Sets,” Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles, “American Exceptionalism,” “Sole Superpower”…) and the nation-states or corporate entities will be destroyed by their own inventions and their own power.
Exhausted in protracted wars, society becomes remorseful and reflective, and collectively says, “Never Again!” And then are born the League of Nations, the United Nations, NATO, SEATO, WTO, NAFTA, WB, WHO, ASEAN and other alphabet soups.
This works for a few decades, enough time for the new people to succeed to leadership roles in these institutions, which, by now, have become bureaucratic behemoths. These new leaders have no visceral connection to why these organizations came into existence, and successive generations do not learn much from their predecessors. So, every second or third generation goes through the same iteration — tapas-boon-hubris (pride)-destruction-tapas — coming up with more powerful and lethal toys in each iteration that science and technology develop. Hence more disastrous consequences.
The physical deaths in the conflicts and wars these days may not be in the tens of millions, as they were during WW-II, or in 5 to 6 million in Vietnam, Korea, and Cambodia after World War-II. But modern-day conflicts and localized wars destabilize hundreds and hundreds of millions of people globally, not to speak of the damage to flora, fauna, and the environment.
The cycle of wars-remorse-new wars has been the template ever since man started recording global events. These invasions, conquests, and wars have ALWAYS been there throughout history, whether man recorded them or not. Before the Industrial Revolution, warring armies used foot soldiers with spears and swords, cavalry, elephants, and horses. The conflicts and their immediate effects were confined to an area of radius of one hundred miles, with deaths in a few thousands.
[But here was the problem: Man’s recording of history was not comprehensive. He was recording history only when he saw it worthy of recording, and if he saw it. If the conflicts happened thousands of miles away that was not of any interest to him, or he did not even know about them, it never happened because there was no record of them in his history books. The lack of objectivity adds another dimension to the complexity.]
But after Sir Isaac and Jim Watt, mankind’s instinct to control and dominate gave us guns, artillery, tanks, jet planes and now drones, and all kinds of fancy bombs and delivery systems. And these bombs are fired by technicians staring at computer terminals, sipping coffee, playing with joysticks to fire missiles. Very often, they sit hundreds – even thousands – of miles away. The deaths are in hundreds of thousands, spread over a vast swath of land spreading over a few thousand miles.
As someone cynically remarked, peacetime is a short interregnum between periods of war and conflict.
In earlier wars, nation-states fought with each other for control of resources or strategic locations — spices, oil and strategic minerals, Suez or Panama Canals, Straits of Malacca or Hormuz… In the colonial days in India, believe it or not, Anglo-French wars were fought on Indian soils with Indian soldiers spilling blood for the French and the English in Europe. What an anachronism!
But today, AI is adding yet another dimension whose ramifications are ominous to the collective civilizations of the entire mankind. AI is automating most of the repetitive human activities, and even eliminating any human interface to run many machines. For many activities — meteorology, radiology, sorting, stacking, packing, shipping merchandise, proof reading, editing, and a host of other activities — human interface will not be, or only very minimally be needed. Thus, we see huge reduction of workforce for all kinds of activities, with power and wealth concentrated in an ever-shrinking number of global elite groups.
See New York Times articles here and here on Jacob Coxon, an engineer, and Dario Amodei the CEO at Anthropic, on the threat of an unbridled AI’s growth to our collective civilization. Anthropic is a privately-held AI startup that has the potential to go over one trillion dollars on the day it goes public.
And nobody knows how to bridle this demon, given that all big players in the US, EU, China, Japan, and other places want to get ahead of others in this geopolitical lethal race. There is nothing new in this game. This has been the template for ALL development throughout history in Science and Technology.
While all science and technology developments in their abstraction are value-neutral, Man, throughout history, has done a fantastic job of abusing these value-neutral findings in his urge to control and dominate. Left unchecked, the new demon AI has the potential to devour mankind itself without firing a single shot.
Centuries later, in remote places, people may still be living on Earth with no record of written history. They will be looking at the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of a very large number of their species a long time ago simultaneously in many parts of the globe. And when one of their elders, with insight like that of the Rishis of Ancient India, tells them how their ancestors destroyed themselves by the hubris of their own invention, the AI, nobody would believe. They would laugh and walk away as a mythological story, much like the European colonialists and missionaries looked at stories in Indian mythology.